Savage Entertainment

I. “A Joke Movie”

When Gore Vidal died in 2012, he had been famous for six and a half decades. He was one of the best-known writers in America, although he was far better known for being a writer than for any specific thing he wrote. This might be due to the sheer volume and range of his output: plays, screenplays, TV scripts, historical novels, satires, literary essays, political jeremiads and memoirs, in addition to a vast personal correspondence. He rivals Groucho Marx as a source of quotable one-liners. “Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television,” he once quipped—nobody is entirely sure when or where he first said it, but that quote seems to originate in a television interview sometime in the 1970s. This is by no means his funniest line, but it captures his personality better than most of his others.

Vidal could be savage, even when attacking his own projects, not least the film Caligula, which was based on the life of an insane Roman emperor. Caligula was first screened in 1979, and went into wide release in 1980. It was originally meant to be titled Gore Vidal’s Caligula, but after the director rewrote the script and barred its author from the set, Vidal sued to have his name taken off the project entirely. He then began trashing Caligula in interviews, calling it “easily one of the worst films ever made,” and telling Time magazine that, “It is not just another bad movie. It’s a joke movie.” These were by no means his rudest comments about it. 

Curiously, Caligula wasn’t the worst film that Vidal was involved with; that was probably Myra Breckinridge, a 1970 adaptation of one of Vidal’s more notorious novels. Like Caligula, polite society found it shockingly obscene, and it also features at least one instance of male rape. There was no pornography in Myra Breckinridge, but the hardcore footage that ended up in Caligula wasn’t Vidal’s idea, nor even the responsibility of the film’s director Tinto Brass—it was shot and inserted by the film’s producer, Penthouse mogul Bob Guccione. It is difficult to say exactly who was in control of the production. The producers, the director, and the writer all had different ideas about what the story was, how it should develop, and what the results ought to look like on the screen. 

Cast and crew alike tend to describe the shooting of Caligula as a thoroughly miserable experience. Vidal compared the ordeal to ancient Rome’s sewer: “If you go to the Cloaca Massima, it’s not pleasant people that you run into. With this film, they’re dragging me up to my neck in the Cloaca Massima.” Still, Caligula wasn’t a total disaster, at least not financially speaking. It turned a moderate profit in cinemas and made even more money in the home-video market. As late as 2005, around 3,000 DVD copies of Caligula were still being sold every month. Admittedly this might be because Vidal once described it as “the Ben Hur of porn.” 

But Caligula isn’t really smut—it’s too violent and depressing to satisfy the usual functions of that sort of film. Beneath all the sleaze and melodrama (both offscreen and on) lurks real artistic ambition on the part of the actors, the art department, the director, the competing producers, and (of course) Vidal himself, even if nobody ever managed to agree on what they were all trying to create. The star, Malcolm McDowell, insisted for decades that he gave one of his finest performances in the title role, only to have that achievement destroyed by incompetent editing. 

Almost everybody involved with Caligula agrees that the edit was botched. If you have seen the film, you will probably agree. Even viewers who tend to ignore these things will notice how ineptly the film was cut in several scenes, and a legend arose over the years that the ninety-plus hours of raw footage contained the seeds of an authentic masterpiece (or at least a respectable film) that could be salvaged from the wreckage, and reassembled into something resembling the director’s (or writer’s) original intentions. 

By chance, almost all of the original camera negatives for Caligula survived the chaos of production, the ensuing legal battles, and the messy aftermath. In 2019, the art historian Thomas Negovan was hired to examine it, and he was then tasked with assembling the footage into a “definitive” version. Caligula: The Ultimate Cut was first screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023, and has now been released on DVD and Blu-ray. The result is less a restoration than a completely new film that is both longer and more coherent than the original. Some of the nudity has been cut out (although there still is quite a bit) and none of the sexually explicit material remains. Self-evidently, Negovan has done a great deal of work. But was it worth the effort?

II. The Real Caligula

“Caligula” was the lifelong nickname of the Roman emperor Gaius Caesar, who was born on 31 August AD 12. He spent many of the first years of his life in army camps where his father Germanicus was on campaign. His nickname comes from the “caligulae,” or tiny “caligae” (soldier’s boots) that he wore as a child. Germanicus died when Caligula was seven and a power struggle in the imperial family followed that ended with Caligula’s mother under house arrest. Caligula was sent to live with his great-grandmother Livia—the widow of the Emperor Augustus—until she died in AD 29 at the age of 86. When Caligula turned eighteen the following year, the Emperor Tiberius summoned him to the island of Capri, and he became a potential heir to the throne after the emperor’s own son Drusus was poisoned.

Tiberius was a bitter, troubled, grief-stricken man who struggled under the burden of countless past traumas. Or he might have simply been a sadistic and paranoid pervert. Or both. In AD 26, after a dozen years on the throne, he retired to Capri to administer the empire from one of his villas. Historians allege that he spent his spare time indulging in all manner of sordid and unusual vices until he died in March AD 37 at the age of 78. According to a number of ancient writers, Caligula is variously rumoured to have poisoned, starved, or smothered the old man on his deathbed. 

As emperor, Caligula got off to a good start—he was personally popular, and enjoyed six successful months until he fell seriously ill. When he recovered, he forced the suicides of a number of close allies whom he accused of plotting against him. Then, in June AD 38, his sister Drusilla died. She was his favourite of his three sisters, and some sources suggest that he had a sexual relationship with her. It seems at least plausible that he had a fling with Drusilla’s husband. Whatever the truth of those rumours, around the time of Drusilla’s death, he began attacking and humiliating the entire Roman Senate.

Caligula could be extravagant as well as cruel. He depleted Rome’s treasury on needless expenditures, and managed to squander both his own fortune and his wife’s on self-indulgent displays of power. Conspiracies against him inevitably developed, particularly after he insisted on being recognised as a god. He was not a good administrator, and he mismanaged the Roman Empire, treating the Jewish communities at Alexandria and Judaea with particular brutality. His most notorious act may have been his promise to appoint his horse Incitatus as consul, but he did not live long enough to subject the Senate to that final humiliation. In January AD 41 he was assassinated by members of his own Praetorian Guard.

Caligula’s life was complicated, and it is difficult to sort truth from myth because our most reliable sources of information have been lost. Tacitus, the greatest of Roman historians, wrote at length about Caligula in his monumental Annals of the years AD 14–68. Unfortunately, the sections relating to Caligula’s reign (AD 37–41) are missing, which means that much of what we know comes from a gossipy biography by Suetonius, a high-ranking civil servant who was born almost thirty years after Caligula’s death and never let an anecdote pass unrecorded, no matter how unreliable. 

At least Suetonius is an absorbing read—other ancient accounts are of much lower literary quality. Translated excerpts of them have been collected in The Emperor Caligula in the Ancient Sources by Anthony Barrett and John Yardley. This is not a long book and there is not much to go on for anyone trying to compile a coherent account of Caligula’s life. Many of the historical sources contradict one another on important details, although all agree that Caligula was completely insane—they just disagree about the details of his insanity.

Ancient writers developed a morbid fascination with anecdotes about Caligula’s state of mind, not all of which are plausible. Allegations include: drinking pearls dissolved in vinegar; eating food covered in gold leaf; forcing members of the aristocracy, male and female, to have sex with him; raping aristocrats who refused his advances; turning part of his palace into a brothel; having sex with his sisters (not just Drusilla); whimsically humiliating, torturing, and/or executing members of the Senate; threatening to move the capital of the Roman Empire to Alexandria; and having an excessive fondness for all things Egyptian.

In 1934, the classicist John Percy Vivian Dacre Balsdon of Exeter College, Oxford, published an influential biography titled The Emperor Gaius in which he suggested that Caligula might not have been as bad as the ancient writers alleged. More recent biographers, including Aloys Winterling and Anthony Barrett, have taken up Balsdon’s suggestions to varying degrees. Barrett believes that Caligula was a loose cannon who had no sense of when to hold his tongue, and suggests that a sardonic joke about appointing his horse as Roman consul was misreported and blown out of proportion. This does not seem far-fetched given the multiple exaggerations and errors in the historical sources (not just Suetonius). But is it psychologically plausible?

In general, the revisionist biographies of the past century or so acknowledge that there is relatively little to revise. Even from the most sympathetic viewpoint, with extreme scepticism towards all of the more outlandish stories, it is difficult to conclude that Caligula was just a misunderstood and sensitive young man, temperamentally ill-suited to authority and posthumously slandered by malicious enemies eager to ruin his reputation. More obviously he was, by any reckoning, irresponsible, emotionally unstable, and viciously impulsive. 

The finest fictional account of Caligula’s life can be found in Robert Graves’s 1934 novel I, Claudius, which has been deservedly popular ever since it was first published. Caligula is a secondary character in this story, which was intended as a sympathetic rehabilitation of Caligula’s uncle and imperial successor, the Emperor Claudius. Graves knew his Latin historians well, and saw no reason to diverge from Suetonius in portraying Caligula as a spendthrift and dangerously unpredictable despot. On the other hand, Graves had no incentive to humanise Caligula, since doing so would have undermined his entire project.

In the 1976 BBC television adaptation of I, Claudius, John Hurt plays Caligula as highly strung, effeminate, and sinisterly childish as well as murderous. Malcolm McDowell is unlikely to have compared his performance to Hurt’s, since I, Claudius was broadcast in autumn 1976 while Caligula was still filming in Rome under increasingly turbulent conditions.

III. Analyses of a Disaster 

Anyone interested in how and why the production of Caligula went so wrong has surprisingly few options in terms of in-depth studies of the disaster. Which is a pity, because the behind-the-scenes conflicts between Vidal, Brass, Guccione, and co-producer Franco Rossellini—the on-set skirmishes, the courtroom battles, and the publicity wars that plagued the movie—are vastly more interesting than anything that ended up on screen.

At the moment, there is only one major academic study of Caligula. In 2009, the late William Hawes, a professor in the School of Communication at the University of Houston, published Caligula and the Fight for Artistic Freedom: The Making, Marketing and Impact of the Bob Guccione Film. Hawes rated Caligula far more highly than the people who actually made it did, but for all the evident love (or obsession) that went into his book, it is not a fraction as exhaustive or well-researched as Ranjit Sandhu’s Saga of Caligula website.

Sandhu spent years writing a study titled 200 Degrees of Failure: The Unmaking of Caligula before abandoning the project in 2017, amid circumstances that sound even more frustrating and stressful than those under which Caligula was originally produced. His story might make for an eye-opening (if dispiriting) appendix to a detailed study of the making of the movie, and some of it is hashed out on his website, albeit with the caution of someone keen to avoid a lawsuit. Nevertheless, Sandhu’s website remains indispensable to anyone interested in how and why so many people involved in the making of Caligula ended up repudiating the film.

Another useful resource is filmmaker Alexander Tuschinski’s 2011 thesis on Caligula, which is more technical than most casual readers would enjoy but convincingly lays out what the director’s original intentions seem to have been. Tuschinski’s 2018 documentary Mission: Caligula is much easier to digest and covers much of the same ground in forty highly watchable minutes. It also discusses Tuschinski’s discovery of a black-and-white work print from 1977 that is apparently the closest thing we have to a director’s cut of the film.

Tuschinski is an engaging guide. He knows his subject so well that he manages to make it seem attractive even to those of us who agree with all the scathing reviews that Caligula has received since its initial release. (Tuschinski was not involved in Caligula: The Ultimate Cut for complicated reasons best ignored here.)

Perhaps the most entertaining source of information on Caligula is Giancarlo Lui’s documentary The Making of Gore Vidal’s Caligula, which was shot mainly on set in 1976, but does not seem to have been released until 1981. It can now be seen as a special feature on several of the DVD releases of Caligula, not just the new multi-disc Blu-ray edition of The Ultimate Cut, and it is well worth watching. It’s either unintentionally hilarious or the work of a saboteur who outdoes even Gore Vidal for exquisitely sly and calculated malice. 

Almost everybody involved with the production is made to look faintly silly, including the documentary’s narrator, Bill Mitchell, whose basso profundo voice makes him sound as if his vocal cords have been marinated in bourbon. His voiceovers, for all their florid verbosity, do not sound nearly as pompous as the monologues of Gore Vidal, who bullshits grandly on historical subjects he plainly knows nothing about in his magnificently resonant voice. Still, he maintains a certain sense of style throughout the proceedings. 

The same cannot be said of Caligula’s director, Tinto Brass, who turns out to be a pudgy, hairy, and excitable yet melancholy little man with no obvious sense of the impression he makes on others. He often wears a floppy khaki-coloured fisherman’s hat that resembles a dead octopus or a piece of wet cardboard. He does not always seem to be in control of either himself or the production, but he clearly gets along well with the cast, including Malcolm McDowell, who appears in an even more unfortunate hat. 

Nobody in the documentary looks more comical than producer Bob Guccione, who seems to be desperate to rival Vidal as a Serious Intellectual, despite his resemblance to a middle-aged divorcee who has decided to show everyone that he’s “still got it.” Clad in leather trousers and tight shirts unbuttoned to expose his gold medallions, he surrounds himself with Renaissance-style antiques to show off his taste and power. Guccione was no fool, though. By the mid-1970s, he was already one of the richest men in America, and Penthouse was selling over four and a half million copies a month.

The star of the documentary is Caligula’s production designer, Danilo Donati. His sumptuous sets and costumes steal the show, and look far more impressive here than they do in the film. Of course, this is thanks to the craftsmen caught on camera from time to time as they patiently transform Donati’s visions into something approaching reality. Admirably, they simply get on with their jobs, heedless of all the self-indulgence and bickering around them. Not everybody involved in this production was an unhinged egomaniac.

The most engrossing element of The Making of Gore Vidal’s Caligula is the palpable tension generated by the power struggle between Guccione, Vidal, and Brass. Each of these men had a radically different notion of who Caligula was and why he turned out that way and each had his own idiosyncratic views about how to make a movie and what the purpose of the production ought to be. There seems to have been absolutely no agreement on the point of the whole exercise, let alone on who was really in charge of it.

IV. The Writer

Gore Vidal did not come up with the idea for Caligula on his own. Surprisingly, the film originated with a scenario written for the great Italian director Roberto Rossellini, a pioneer of postwar neo-realist cinema responsible for classics like Rome: Open City (1945) and Stromboli (1950). In the early 1960s, Rossellini began a second career making quiet, cerebral, strangely gripping television films about important historical figures like Blaise Pascal and St. Augustine of Hippo. It seems that Caligula was to have been part of this series. It certainly would have been the most ambitious of the bunch. Warner Brothers was willing to produce it, but only if Rossellini cast Hollywood actors in the leading roles. Rossellini refused, and abandoned the project in 1971 after almost a decade of work.

Ranjit Sandhu has published an early scenario for this project on his website. A more refined treatment was published in Italian in 1972 by one of Rossellini’s friends. Both are no more than rough outlines, but there was promising material for a film there. Rossellini’s nephew Franco mentioned the project to his friend Gore Vidal, hoping to persuade him to write the screenplay. Naturally, Vidal wanted to restart from scratch and write his own version. He seems not to have looked at the Rossellini scenarios at all. This may have been a mistake.

On paper, at least, Vidal was an inspired choice. He already had a respectable track record as a professional screenwriter, having spent most of the 1950s working on television dramas, and he had worked in Hollywood as a script doctor, most famously on the biblical epic Ben Hur (1959). Throughout his life, he claimed to have introduced subversive gay elements into the script, although they are subtle enough to be imperceptible to most viewers. Still, the story is plausible—Vidal was openly hostile to Christianity at a time when this was still shocking to most ordinary Americans.

Vidal’s best-known work to date was his historical novel Julian (1964), which re-imagined the life of the Emperor Julian the Apostate, who ruled the Roman Empire from AD 361–63, and tried to restore philosophical paganism as the dominant religion in Rome. The novel amounted to a self-flattering self-portrait of the artist as a noble but doomed patriotic hero, selflessly trying to save people from the delusions, repressions, and hypocrisies of Christianity. For all its flaws, Julian has always been popular among readers who see themselves in a similar light. It has an attractive (or potentially attractive) political dimension as well as an anti-religious one; combined, these are catnip to an audience of university-educated intellectuals.

Vidal lived in Rome, and was fond of comparing the American Empire to the Roman one, especially in terms of decadence. Sometimes he overdid it, of course. One of his more notable stage plays is Romulus (1962), a free adaptation of the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s “unhistorical historical comedy” Romulus the Great (1950), which imagines the very last days of the Roman Empire as lived by Romulus Augustus, the comically impotent emperor. Vidal’s retelling is less successful than the original, which is more absurdist than satirical. Romulus demonstrates how, as a dramatist, Vidal could be heavy-handed and tendentious to the point of preachiness. The action in his work often drags, because he preferred writing clever one-liners to formulating a coherent dramatic structure.

An even bigger weakness was Vidal’s poor grasp of classical history. Although he had a well-stocked mind, he knew next to nothing about ancient Rome beyond what a tour guide might divulge. Admirers of Vidal’s historical novels on American subjects often miss that he was completely out of his depth when it came to the ancient world. Reading Julian, it is apparent how overwhelmed he was by trying to teach himself about the vast, complicated subject he was trying to fictionalise. He shares too much of his undigested research, and much of the original Caligula script suffers from a similar problem, exacerbated by Vidal’s failure to decide what he was trying to write.

As he explained it in interviews, Vidal’s conception of his subject was embarrassingly simplistic. Caligula, he claimed, was an inexperienced, traumatised, fearful young man who should never have held power. Occasionally, he supplemented this view with some boilerplate condemnations of tyranny, and the usual vague but sonorously oratorical comparisons between the decadent Roman Empire and the flailing American one. None of this accounts for Caligula’s personality or actions in any recognisable way, so perhaps it was a smokescreen. 

Vidal’s various drafts of the Caligula script suggest that he was less interested in history than in putting his own sexual fantasies on the big screen. And while the director and producers were trying to do much the same, they each had quite different fantasies.

V. The Producers and the Director

Franco Rossellini knew that Bob Guccione was interested in making films. Guccione had already invested money in Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic Chinatown, and he went out on a limb to help fund John Schlesinger’s challenging 1975 adaptation of Nathanael West’s satirical novel The Day of the Locust. But helping other people realise their creative visions was not enough for him. Unfortunately, he wanted to make movies of his own.

Guccione led a fascinating life. He came from a middle-class family in New Jersey, and thought seriously about becoming a Catholic priest until he discovered he had no taste for celibacy. After leaving school, he married his first wife at eighteen, then left her with their child so he could go to Europe and become a painter. How this failed artist ended up founding Penthouse is a story that deserves its own biopic. He was a self-made man in the American tradition, and he made sure nobody forgot it. His sensitivity about the fact was almost touching.

Franco Rossellini understood Guccione’s obsession with respectability. At heart, Guccione wanted to become socially acceptable as revenge on journalists who sneered at him for being a pornographer. He began by building a serious art collection before deciding to become a patron of the arts himself. Rossellini saw how easy it would be to sell Guccione on the idea of producing a prestigious motion picture scripted by Gore Vidal, who was then America’s most famous man of letters. Not only was Vidal the grandson of a senator, but his mother’s second husband also became the second husband of Jackie Kennedy’s mother, which made him the stepbrother once removed of the widow of an American president. In Guccione’s eyes, all of this made Vidal preternaturally glamorous, as well as—more importantly—irreproachably respectable.

In the summer of 1975, Vidal was commissioned to write the screenplay for a film tentatively titled Gore Vidal’s Caligula. His fee was US$225,000 plus ten percent of the gross. Guccione wanted to hire a big-name director like John Huston to helm the project. Other more avant-garde possibilities included Nicolas Roeg, whose arty 1973 thriller Don’t Look Now includes a sex scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland that was considered shockingly explicit at the time. But for some reason, Guccione settled on Tinto Brass, director of an X-rated film called Salon Kitty (1976) about a Nazi brothel in wartime Berlin staffed by SS spies.

In an interview published in the April 1977 edition of American Film, Vidal was less than complimentary about Brass:

Penthouse Films picked an Italian director, Tinto Brass. I said, “all right, if we can use him as a pencil, take him.” I mean, he’s a competent cameraman and editor. He’s made about ten pictures. Each failed. Failure is a habit people seldom break. That’s another thing to remember when you’re picking a director. Peter O’Toole, who played Tiberius in Caligula, referred to Tinto Brass as “Tinto Zinc.” O’Toole has a nice sense of the way the world should be ordered. “In a well-run world,” he said, “this man would be cleaning windows in Venice. Instead, here he is spending eight million dollars and destroying a script.”

Brass, for his part, complained that his screenwriter knew nothing about history. Brass was not the only one to complain about Vidal. Guccione thought there was too much gay sex in the first draft of the script, in which the only heterosexual sex took place between Caligula and his sister Drusilla. He wanted to produce something that could be sold to mass audiences as highbrow erotica and Vidal’s initial work was too subversive for the socially anxious publisher of Penthouse.

Brass, meanwhile, became fixated on his own elaborate fantasies, which seem in part to have been inspired by the films of Federico Fellini. He said he saw sex as a medium of communication (the reasoning on this topic is difficult to follow). How all of this ties into Brass’s vision of Caligula as a satirical meditation on the nature of power is difficult to describe coherently, although that did not prevent Brass from attempting to do so, often at great length. Vidal had no time for this kind of continental “intellectual masturbation,” and he was indignant at having to write at least seven drafts of the script.

The philosophies of Vidal, Brass, and Guccione were never going to coexist harmoniously. Guccione was a libertine libertarian, as might have been expected from a wealthy pornographer, and he was too busy making money to overthink his political views. Brass, on the other hand, was a hard-left anarchist with strong Marxist sympathies who believed that power was inherently immoral. Inevitably, he would clash with Vidal, who not only believed in power, but saw no problem in using it against his enemies. “Freedom and liberalism are aberrations in the history of the world,” he always said, and he was fairly relaxed about the prospect of achieving his preferred ends with illiberal or even authoritarian means.

Brass’s suspicions about power inevitably interfered with his day-to-day effectiveness as a director. Uncomfortable with asserting his own authority, he preferred to charm and manipulate his cast and crew to get what he wanted. Vidal experienced no such discomfort. In his essays and interviews, he dismissed the need for a director on any film, except as a servant of the writer. For him, the writer was the only essential part of a film crew, and everybody else—the director included—was dispensable. It is hardly surprising that when shooting began on Caligula in the summer of 1976, Brass banned Vidal from the set.

VI. The Production

Guccione initially had trouble finding actors who were willing to perform in Caligula. Orson Welles turned down a million dollars to play Tiberius because he was so appalled by the script. Sir John Gielgud was similarly disgusted when he was offered the part for a much smaller fee, so Vidal sent him a nasty letter. Gielgud had second thoughts, and ended up accepting a smaller role as an imperial adviser. Peter O’Toole eventually agreed to play Tiberius. His career was then at a low ebb and he was willing to work for relatively little. Malcolm McDowell did not hesitate to accept the title role because his career had also stalled. Guccione claimed to prefer classically trained English actors because they were more convincingly Roman than Americans. In truth, they were simply cheaper than their Hollywood counterparts.

Caligula had few major parts for women, although these provided their share of headaches as well. Drusilla, the sister with whom Caligula has an incestuous relationship in the movie, was originally meant to be played by Maria Schneider. Schneider’s first major film was Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), in which she played a young woman in an anonymous sexual relationship with a grieving hotel owner played by Marlon Brando. Bertolucci did not tell Schneider that her character would be anally raped in one scene. She only found out when the cameras were rolling. Unsurprisingly, she became uncomfortable with nude scenes from then onwards. Why she agreed to work on Caligula in the first place is anybody’s guess. 

Schneider walked off the set early in the shoot, and Brass replaced her with Teresa Ann Savoy, who had played a prostitute in Salon Kitty. This was one of the only casting choices to meet with general approval. Guccione had flown thirteen Penthouse Pets from New York to Rome to appear in Caligula, and was appalled to learn that Brass gave them nothing to do except stand around in the background with no clothes on. It seems they had no place in Brass’s Fellini-esque erotic vision. Guccione, for his part, was repelled by what he saw as Brass’s fixation on sex acts featuring people who were old, ugly, out of shape, or otherwise far beneath Penthouse’s standards of physical perfection.

Helen Mirren, who played Caligula’s fourth wife, Caesonia, was charmed by Brass, and has always defended him and his work. But others waged open war on him, not least Guccione, who was exasperated by Brass’s inefficient working methods and profligacy. He began denouncing his director as a “communist.” After shooting wrapped, Guccione seized the rushes and spirited them away for editing. He also filmed new scenes behind the director’s back, most of which were pornographic. Brass was prevented from editing—or even looking at—any of the material he had spent half a year shooting.

Enraged and humiliated, Brass sued Guccione to assert his right to edit his own film, but he was outmanoeuvred by the Penthouse legal team, and ended up having his name removed as director. The credits for all versions of Caligula now read: “principal photography by Tinto Brass.” No director is credited.

VII. The Original Film

After two and a half years of protracted legal wrangling, Caligula was first shown in public in Rome on 14 August 1979. The authorities shut it down within a week on account of its obscene content. It went into wide release in America in February 1980, and was universally derided by critics.

Despite its reputation as a pornographic film, there is little if anything that an audience might find arousing in Caligula. Most of it is either boring or faintly repulsive, except for the scenes that make you squirm or cringe. Brass might not have been the ideal choice for making an erotic film; he was like a drug dealer who gets high on his own supply. In November 1976, when Caligula was still in production, Vidal told the Italian press:

I don’t want anything to do with that horrendous film which is exploiting my name. I’m starting legal action to have my name removed from the title. I’m furious about the liberties that they’ve taken manipulating my work and I want no part of a film that could very well be charged with obscenity. They have trampled me. My original screenplay was meant to be a rigorously historical film, not this porno-cartoon that they’ve made of it. Sex doesn’t bother me but I can’t stand filth. And in this film there is filth of every nature, abundantly described by dependable witnesses such as Adriana Asti and Peter O’Toole.

A few months later, in an interview with the Advocate (9 March 1977) he was even more damning:

I believe they are using a good part of my script, but to what effect? The film is full of improvisation of a particularly loathsome kind––women blowing horses, that kind of thing. I can’t believe that there’s much of an audience for this, unless horses are now going to the movies. … [T]his man Brass had set out to become an auteur du cinema, at whatever cost to my script. It’s a mess, and it could have been such a good movie. Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud, a wonderful cast, came along all set for a Shakespearian mood, and found they were being asked to appear in a comic-strip porno film with sets that look like the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. Every scene has someone playing with his/her cunt or cock, but even when one’s making a porno film, one should have some sense of what one’s about: Brass has no notion of pacing. It’s pretty childish.

Vidal seems never to have bothered watching Caligula. He complained at length about the film’s awkward dialogue and lurid action, but it was already there in the various drafts of his own screenplay, at least two of which can be found circulating in PDF form on the internet. Brass is to blame for going too far in a few places, but Caligula’s symbolic preoccupations with incest, castration, and beheading came from Vidal’s imagination, not the director’s.

Some of Guccione’s additions to Caligula come as a positive relief. The lesbian scene he inserted into the film makes little narrative sense, and arrives so soon after a sexual encounter between Caligula, Drusilla, and Caesonia that it seems gratuitous. On the other hand, these scenes are preceded by an elaborate beheading sequence and a pair of violent rape scenes, so it is a relief to relax and de-activate the disgust reflex for a few minutes in anticipation of the next set of outrages. So much of the film is unpleasant to sit through that even prudish viewers may welcome what they might otherwise condemn as pornography.

Whoever was ultimately responsible for editing the 1979 cut of Caligula was evidently not concerned about creating a coherent or intelligible narrative. It is frequently hard to tell whether the tastelessness in Caligula is intentional and provocative or if it is the result of ignorance and poor judgement. 

For instance, the film opens with a dreamy sequence set in a sunlit woodland, where a happy young couple playfully make love like overgrown children. Absent the nudity and sex acts, it could be a 1970s shampoo commercial. It all seems a lot less innocent once we discover that the couple are Caligula and his sister Drusilla, but this is not obvious until the next scene, when Caligula wakes up in bed with Drusilla after a bad dream. The juxtaposition is nonsensical: Following a night of sex with his sister, Caligula needs to be comforted by her after he awakens from a nightmare in which they have more sex? It’s so bewilderingly stupid that the incest itself almost fails to register. When a black bird, which Caligula believes is a bad omen, flies into the bedroom, Malcolm McDowell becomes so hysterical that it seems as if Caligula has already gone mad.

None of this is really Brass’s fault, since it’s all reasonably faithful to Gore Vidal’s original script. Only in the next scene do the director’s weaknesses also become impossible to ignore. Macro, the Prefect of the Praetorian Guard, notifies Caligula that Tiberius has summoned him to Capri, and travels there with him. There follows a brief but tiresome scene of Caligula sitting in a sedan chair, listening to Macro’s advice, which Vidal wrote as a clumsy vehicle for expository dialogue. Brass decided to use it as an excuse to show a lot of muscular, scantily clad young men standing around with nothing important to do. Most of the nudity in Caligula has this thoughtless quality. Brass introduces naked or underdressed extras of both sexes into every available background space and gives them nothing to do. Much of the time, they just stand there trying not to look cold.

It may be fair to blame at least some of this awkward nudity on production designer Danilo Donati. He deserves credit for assembling 64 sets, a few of which are genuinely impressive, even if they are often made to look cheap and shabby by indifferent lighting and lacklustre camerawork. But the anachronistic costumes were Donati’s sole responsibility. He can be forgiven for letting his imagination run away with him here and there. Nobody really cares whether every detail of ancient Roman clothing has been recreated with strict historical accuracy, especially in a film like this. But the production design seems to follow no consistent visual program at all. The official dress of senators, soldiers, and imperial officials tends to be reproduced faithfully, but Donati evidently had no idea how to design sexually alluring costumes.

These are just about forgivable on extras and background performers; but Malcolm McDowell is often made to look ridiculous. Most unflattering of all is the costume McDowell wears when Sir John Gielgud’s character is dying. It amounts to a sort of sheer white robe that resembles a shower curtain, underneath which he wears a bodybuilder’s thong profoundly ill-suited to the actor’s string-bean physique. At least this is better than the makeup, which often scarcely rises to the standard of a school play. So careless is the detail in this production that it is sometimes hard to believe that it’s the work of trained professionals.

It must be said that beneath all the mediocrity, laziness, incompetence, and chaos there are a few worthwhile elements in Caligula. Some effort is required to find them, because it often feels as though Vidal, Brass, and Guccione have each dumped a sack of material at your feet and left you to assemble it yourself whilst they all go their separate ways to have lunch. For some audiences this is part of the film’s attraction: it allows you to sneer at others’ incompetence and daydream about creating something better yourself one day, without running any of the risks involved in actual creation. Caligula has developed a cult following among would-be filmmakers and other frustrated creative types who want to learn from all of the mistakes. But there are positive lessons as well.

Vidal’s script contains at least one brilliant idea that helps explain Caligula’s insane cruelty. In a number of scenes, he is made to seem terrified of death and his own permanent extinction. He is afraid of the possibility that there might be no such thing as an immortal soul, and thus no continuation of anything like consciousness after we die. As a result, he continually seeks assurances that the gods are immortal and that there is life after death. This is a major theme in several of the film’s death scenes.

Caligula’s despair about the prospect of oblivion sends him mad after Drusilla dies, and drives his growing derangement through the final third of the film. He decides he is a god on account of his desperate yearning for immortality, a genuinely inspired reading of Caligula’s character. This idea does not originate with Vidal: Albert Camus built his 1944 stage play around the same concept. Even so, Vidal’s use of it seems wholly original. Unfortunately, he does little to develop it, except in a few fleeting sequences. The fear of death is introduced early on and re-emphasised in two key scenes; then it disappears. Besides which, Caligula is mad and cruel long without any clear motivation long before Drusilla dies.

If Caligula is less shocking than Vidal or Brass intended, it is because so much of the brutality is arbitrary and senseless. When Caligula decides to rape a virgin bride on her wedding day and then rape her husband and have him tortured and castrated, there is no surprise, because by that point we expect nothing else from him. Luckily for the audience, Malcolm McDowell does a valiant job of transforming Vidal’s loose collection of self-contradictory impulses into something like a coherent character.

The film would be unwatchable without the exemplary professionalism of English classical actors. Most of the Italian cast members are unimpressive, but Sir John Gielgud and Helen Mirren in particular give such an illusion of personality and life that they make you forget the surrounding artlessness and ineptitude. Peter O’Toole and Malcolm McDowell overact somewhat, no doubt because the actors could not make sense of their characters as written in the script. (It is said that O’Toole was also stoned throughout most of the shoot, having taken up cannabis in an effort to stop drinking.)

McDowell threw himself into his role, but his claim that the editing of Caligula butchered his best work has been untestable until now. With the release of Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, we finally have an opportunity to judge for ourselves.

VIII. The Reconstruction

Ranjit Sandhu, Alexander Tuschinski, and Thomas Negovan have all given extensive interviews on various podcasts over the years about the prospect of restoring Caligula. Whether the latest version of the film is a “restoration” or a “reconstruction” is a fraught issue for those still emotionally invested in the project. Malcolm McDowell has been especially generous with his praise of Negovan’s work on Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, while others have distanced themselves from it, including Tinto Brass,  who—at the age of 91—threatened legal action against Penthouse Films a few months before the screening of The Ultimate Cut at the Cannes Film Festival.

Negovan’s strategy was straightforward: he sought to produce the most logical, plausible, intelligent narrative possible without using any of the footage used in the 1979 version of Caligula. He used the latest available version of Gore Vidal’s screenplay as a blueprint, knowing that some of the dialogue was rewritten by McDowell and Brass or else improvised on set. This seems like a common-sense approach, although Brass is understandably upset that, for a second time, he has not been allowed to edit the 1976 footage he shot in accordance with his original vision.

To anybody who has sat through one of the earlier versions of Caligula, Negovan’s Ultimate Cut will feel like a completely new film. It runs for almost three hours—half an hour or so longer than any previously available version. There is a fresh musical score, a new introduction (consisting of three and a half minutes of text), and an animated credit sequence that reconstructs Caligula’s elaborate nightmare—the pastoral incest fantasy has been moved from the beginning to the middle of the action, where it serves as a fever dream during Caligula’s illness. Some scenes have been reshuffled for the sake of narrative coherence; others are noticeably shorter or longer. Overall, the film is slower, less sexually explicit, less violent, and less confusing.

Many viewers will be relieved that The Ultimate Cut features less castration than previous versions of the film do and all of the hardcore pornography has been removed. Instead, Negovan has focussed on showcasing Danilo Donati’s sets, and bringing out the best in the main performances. Helen Mirren’s is a particular revelation. Her character, Caesonia, is a ghostly presence in the 1979 Caligula, but in The Ultimate Cut she dominates the final hour or so of the action, stealing every scene in which she appears. Her chemistry with McDowell is a pleasure to watch, even during the most graphic scenes.

All in all, Negovan has done a thoroughly creditable job of transforming an awful movie into a mediocre one. Some of his decisions are puzzling, to be sure. The new animation sequence under the opening credits looks a bit cheap, while the musical score seems better suited to a video game than a big-budget feature film. And Negovan’s editing can be amateurish even when compared with the film’s original cut. Perhaps this is its most glaring weakness. Tinto Brass was hardly a master of classical cinematic technique, but he had a better technical understanding of how to tell a story.

Nevertheless, the reconstruction project is fascinating from a technical point of view, and one can learn a great deal about writing, performing, editing, and producing for the screen simply by comparing The Ultimate Cut with one of the previous versions of Caligula. The new multi-disc Blu-ray release has helpfully provided us with a valuable record of one of the most captivating disasters in cinema history and a unique insight into the filmmaking craft.

An impressive amount of effort has gone into The Ultimate Cut, even though there is no obvious market for this material. There seems to be no way to transform the raw footage into something that might entertain a normal person. Those who think of themselves as experts and connoisseurs of cinema will also be, for the most part, dissatisfied with the fruits of Negovan’s labours, because as art, Caligula simply does not work. Even people who enjoy trashy or incompetently made films for their camp value will find their patience exhausted. Those who just want to watch smut will be the most disappointed of all since the content they seek has been excised.

And yet, 45 years after its first screening, Caligula retains a perverse allure, which is perhaps best explained by an anecdote in Plato’s Republic about someone named Leontius. Walking near Athens one day, Leontius passes the spot where public executions take place. Part of him wants to look at the corpses littering the site, and part of him is repulsed by the scene. At last he surrenders to his morbid curiosity and runs towards the bodies. “There you go, you bastards!” he yells at his own eyes: “I hope you get a good look!”